principle of visual quantification discovered in the later Middle 
Ages, as Clagett explained. This principle of translating non-
visual matters of motion and energy into visual terms is the 
very principle of “applied” knowledge in any time or place. The 
Gutenberg technology extended this principle to writing and 
language and the codification and transmission of every kind of 
learning.

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of 
progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of 
social life.

*     In an age which discovered this technique of translation as 
the means of applied  knowledge, it is to be expected that it will 
be found everywhere as a consciously experienced novelty. Sir 
Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry , felt he had hit upon a